3

PRECONDITIONS FOR MODERN CONSPIRACISM

JEWISH ASSIMILATION, PREMILLENNIALISM, AND ARYAN OCCULTISM

Fantasies can achieve a causal status once they have been institutionalized in beliefs, values, and social groups.

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism

Although short-lived conspiracy theories cropped up regularly in the United States, and although monarchists in Europe were constantly on guard against secret societies, the nineteenth century was essentially devoid of conspiracism as a worldview. But in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, conspiracism began to flourish. In 1919, Nesta Webster’s The French Revolution brought the ideas of Robison and Barruel back into print, the Illuminati was rekindled as a threat to civilization, and modern conspiracism began to develop in earnest. The conspiracy theories spawned at this time were much broader than earlier ones, which had been more constrained by reality and featured secretive groups with limited, comprehensible goals. Nationalist movements were active from Ireland to Greece; Freemasons’ numbers and influence had grown dramatically in the United States; political machines had tried to mold Catholic immigrants into a voting bloc; powerful slave-state politicians schemed to defeat abolitionists; and East Coast bankers defended the gold standard. But the conspiracy theories built around these groups did not last—in part because the narratives around them were grounded in reality enough to be held up against actual events and shown to be untrue or, at least, overblown.

Twentieth-century conspiracy theories, by contrast, dealt with larger, more diffuse groups, like the Illuminati, and with more comprehensive and menacing goals, typically world domination. The very breadth of the goals makes it much harder to hold these conspiracy theories up to reality, and thus they endure. Even when these conspiracy theories center on real groups, such as Communists or Jews, the groups are redefined in a way that make them less identifiable. Reds, pinks, one-worlders, fellow travelers, and liberals; International Jews, Talmudists, the Hidden Government, the Synagogue of Satan—all this terminology casts a net wide enough to capture any perceived enemy. And this does not take into account the conspiracies controlled by the Aldebarans, the Vril, the Ascended Masters, or even, still, the Illuminati.

Some of the reasons behind the changing nature of conspiracy theory are not surprising, while others are rather unexpected. But it is not possible to understand twentieth-century conspiracism without examining such earlier developments. Three of these developments stand out, the largest and most important of which has to do with the widespread assimilation of European Jews and the reaction against them. The second, more a distinctly American phenomenon, is the growth of apocalyptic and millennialist religious thinking. And the third is the occult revival, which ranged from gothic revival literature to mythic racism.

Changing Ideas about the Jews

FROM THE JEWISH ENLIGHTENMENT TO THE PROTOCOLS

Jews in Europe had been subject to religious prejudice for centuries. Sometimes tolerated, sometimes persecuted, their situation had changed relatively little since medieval times. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, some within the Jewish community began supporting the secular, liberal ideas of the Enlightenment. Over the next hundred years, during the period known as the Haskalah (or Jewish Enlightenment) Jewish assimilation progressed with varying success across Europe.1

Early in the nineteenth century, assimilation received some peculiar support from Christian millennialist Restorationists, for whom the arrival of the millennium depended on the restoration of the Jewish kingdom in Zion. The restoration in turn depended, as they saw it, on Jews’ converting to Christianity. The London Society for Propagating Christianity among the Jews (1809) spearheaded the drive for conversion. In France, Napoleon encouraged assimilation by liberalizing laws and even convoking Jewish leaders to deal with pressing issues between Christians and Jews. This effort was successful enough to earn Napoleon a nomination as the Antichrist.2

Jews, by and large, were not interested in converting to Christianity, but many became secular in practice, abandoning traditional garments, speaking their national language instead of Yiddish, trading in their religious education for a secular one. By the second half of the century, many Jews—mostly in western Europe—were active in legal, scientific, and cultural professions and were beginning to make their way into politics, as barriers to their participation fell. The acculturation of Jews in western Europe was so strong that it overrode the burgeoning Zionism common among east European Jews: “In Western Europe, the Zionist movement faced strong opposition from most Jews. They had not only become acculturated but were by now patriotic citizens of their countries and in large part, became middle class. They felt threatened by Zionism because they had a lot to lose. They did not want their loyalty to their country to be questioned or to endanger their citizenship.”3

None of these changes went unnoticed by Judeophobes. On the contrary, Jewish assimilation into modern bourgeois society provided an additional basis for anti-Jewish sentiment: on top of the traditional religious intolerance and social prejudice, a political antisemitism could now emerge. Norman Cohn, in his study of antisemitism, noted that political antisemites “see ‘the Jew’ not only as an uncanny, demonic being but also as . . . a symbol of all the force in the modern world which they themselves hate and fear.”4 Before the middle of the century, pamphlets condemning Jews circulated. One of the first, written under the appellation Satan, introduced the canard that the Rothschilds had built their wealth on advance information about the outcome of the battle of Waterloo. In the wake of the revolutions in 1848, a steady stream of periodicals, novels, and tracts portrayed Jews as a threat. Benjamin Disraeli’s novels of political machinations by Jews were quite popular. Pamphleteers such as E. E. Eckert revived Barruel’s link between Jews and Freemasons. And ultimately most influential, Hermann Goedsche’s 1868 novel Biarritz depicted the leaders of the Israeli tribes of Israel meeting with the Antichrist in the Jewish cemetery in Prague.5

Goedsche’s tale became a key part of what would become The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, but others contributed to this effort as well. In the 1860s a Russian Jew who had converted to Christianity, Jacob Brafman, exposed readers to the Kahal, “a secret, uncanny sort of organization which wielded despotic power . . . , incited the Jewish masses against the State, the government, and the Christian religion, and fostered in these masses fanaticism and dangerous national separatism.”6 Around the same time in France, Gougenot des Mousseaux was creating the idea of “Kabbalistic Jews” by reimagining the Kabbalah (a loose-knit body of mysticism and metaphysical doctrine) as the work of an ongoing Jewish Satan-worshipping cult that celebrated the serpent and the phallus with a constant stream of orgies and murders. In 1873, Frederick Millingen, writing as Major Osman-Bey, laid out the whole conspiracy in World Conquest by the Jews, the first work of its type in English.7 The culmination of these efforts was the infamous Protocols.

The primary source of the Protocols was the Jewish cemetery scene in Goedsche’s Biarritz. Lifted from the novel and published as a pamphlet in 1872, this story and variants spread westward, becoming less fictional as it went. By the time it emerged in Paris in 1886, it was prefaced as “the program of Jewry, the real program of the Jews, expressed by . . . the Chief Rabbi. . . . It is a speech made in the 1880s.”8 According to most sources, the cemetery scene, other antisemitic writing, and an otherwise harmless satire by Maurice Joly were pieced together by (or at least under the direction of) Pyotr Rachkovsky, head of the Russian secret police. This farrago emerged in the early years of the twentieth century as an official-looking and detailed document revealing a multifaceted conspiracy by Jewish leaders to destroy Christian civilization and to rule the world.9

Different editions and versions of the Protocols altered its text; sometimes it was even supplemented with anti-Masonic content. The 1917 version that was distributed to Russian soldiers, titled He Is Near, at the Door . . . Here Comes Antichrist, made its way to the West and was translated into English by Victor Marsden.10 The Protocols provided an absolute and unavoidable framework for a global Jewish conspiracy, which would have been impossible before the Jewish Enlightenment. The Protocols clarified the new picture of the Jews: “Pulling the strings behind the scenes, dominating the new system of modernity, the Jew becomes the cause of every catastrophe.”11

Ironically, given Jewish acculturation and assimilation into the nations in which they lived, the image of “The International Jew” had been gaining ground and was made into a pillar of antisemitic conspiracism by the Protocols. Henry Ford published his famous series of anti-Semitic articles in the Dearborn Independent under the heading, “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.”12 The 1920 British government pamphlet, The Jewish Peril, was among many works echoing this theme. Even increasing evidence that the Protocols were “forgeries” did not stop such articles. America, a Catholic weekly magazine, after allowing that the Protocols “may or may not be authentic,” linked the Jew to every revolutionary movement imaginable. As Norman Cohn summed up: “The Myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy, then, has very little to do with real people and real situations and real conflicts in the modern world, and this seems natural enough when one considers how it originated.”13

The Protocols “new political superstition concerning a secret Jewish government” led directly to two antisemitic conspiracy theories: the finance-based “secret government” and the anti-Christian “hidden hand” plot.14 By envisioning Jews as a powerful cohesive international organization devoted to world domination, the Protocols made it impossible for anyone to be a serious antisemite without becoming a conspiracist as well. In the United States, this was clear by the 1930s as “explanations” of the Protocols were distributed and antisemitic right-wing isolationists moved rapidly into conspiracism.15 Elizabeth Dilling, one of the leaders of the isolationist “mothers’ movement,” began her career blaming Jews for Communism and for overrunning the Holy Land. In 1934 Dilling was sketching out a Jewish-led Communist conspiracy, and by 1940 her self-published book The Octopus was wholly conspiratorial. Her conspiracism became all-encompassing after World War II, including the usual evils (foreign aid, income tax, water fluoridation, race mixing) as well as less typical ones—such as the use of the term “Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area,” which “signaled a plot to obliterate state and national boundaries and place communities under the rule of ‘commisars.’” Shortly before her death in 1966, Dilling set about trying to expose the Vietnam War as a Jewish plot, an example of the Protocols (specifically, number 10) at work.16

Other prominent isolationists followed a similar path. Lois Washburn came to identify the Jews as controlling both the Boy Scouts and all the Yellow Cabs. Lyrl Van Hyning, who had identified several presidents as secret Jews (Woodrow “Wohlson,” for instance), was among the first to observe concentration camps under construction to hold those determined to resist “the Freemasonic State ruled by the statue of King Solomon” that America had become.17 Across the board, antisemites of the 1930s had evolved into conspiracists by the 1950s, if not earlier. Gerald Winrod, a one-man defender of the Christian faith, moved rapidly from the Protocols in 1934 to a Soviet-Zionist-Illuminati conspiracy the next year. Gerald L. K. Smith became strongly antisemitic only in the late 1930s, but by the 1960s his overriding concern was “the conspiracy led by the Jews who plotted the destruction of Christian civilization.” By the time the second generation of post-Protocols antisemites—Southern Methodist University English professor John O. Beaty, for example, or California state senator Jack B. Tenney—came along, their antipathy toward Jews and their conspiratorial worldview were merged from the beginning.18

BRITISH ISRAELISM AND THE KHAZARS

A separate, intensely bizarre strand of antisemitism, known as British Israelism, emerged during the nineteenth century. The underlying idea seems to date from 1794, when Richard Brothers, a self-proclaimed prophet and healer, published A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophesies and Times. One revelation was that Brothers himself was a direct descendent of King David, giving him the right to the English throne—a self-serving consequence of the more general revelation that Anglo-Saxons were descended from one of the tribes of ancient Israel. This eccentric notion nearly faded away before John Wilson revived it by giving it “scientific” validation in his 1840 Our Israelitish Origin. Over the next fifty years, Wilson and others spread the word about the British Israelites. This school of thought was not originally antisemitic; on the contrary, it seems to have been inspired by the desire to join the Jews as God’s chosen people. Nevertheless, by 1876 Wilson had begun to see the difference between the southern kingdom of Judah, where Jews originated, and the northern kingdom of Israel, where the newly discovered Anglo-Saxon “Jews” originated. Wilson argued that: “It is for the northern kingdom and their descendants in particular that the bulk of God’s blessings were intended. They are the chosen among the chosen people, considered far more important instruments of God’s purposes and destined for greater blessings than the Hebrews of the southern kingdom. The southern Jews’ status has been further diminished by intermarriage with inferior peoples, the ‘worst of the Gentiles.’”19

British Israelism spread to North America in the 1880s, where it began to take on a more antisemitic and racist cast. The writings of Charles Totten and John H. Allen contributed to this end, inspiring 1920s Klan leader Reuben Sawyer to link the southern kingdom’s “counterfeit Israelites” to the Jews’ hidden “government within our government.” Another follower of Allen, Howard B. Rand, joined with W. J. Cameron (who oversaw the distribution of Henry Ford’s antisemitic ideas) to create the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America. The relationship between ancient Hebrews and Anglo-Saxons was obvious to Rand, since “Saxon” is clearly derived from “Isaac’s Son,” while “British” combines the Hebrew words “Berith” (covenant) and “Ish” (man). Britain is thus home to Isaac’s sons, the men of the covenant.20

British Israelism was also merged with the flatly racist pre-Adamite theories of Dominick M’Causland and Alexander Winchell. The pre-Adamites, primitive races that predated the Garden of Eden, were the progenitors of every nonwhite race from Eskimos to Australian aborigines. These races were, naturally, far inferior to the Caucasians descended from Adam and Eve. This quasi-theological notion proved easy to combine with antisemitism by way of a two-seed theory. In seed one, Adam and Eve’s son Abel becomes the origin of the white Europeans already established as the true Israelites. In seed two, Eve is seduced by Satan, and gives birth to Cain, the precursor of the Jews—who are by this logic the literal children of Satan. This two-seed version of British Israelism is the underlying “theology” of today’s Christian Identity movement.21

A final element in this was contributed by obscure academic interest in the conversion to Judaism of Khazars around the ninth century. Escaping repressive regimes, many Jews had fled to Khazaria, a region largely east of the Black Sea, and some Khazarian leaders had subsequently been converted to Judaism. In the late nineteenth century, the idea of Khazarian Jews was hijacked by British Israelite antisemites claiming that Ashkenazi Jews were not even descended from the southern kingdom of Judah (and, thus, not Jewish in any sense) but were, rather, a wholly nonbiblical group of people descended from Khazars. This idea reinforced the British Israelites’ increasingly antisemitic stance that only white northern Europeans could trace their lineage back to biblical times. It is not surprising that the Khazarian Jew became part of the Ku Klux Klan’s ideology, along with the two-seed theory.22 All this means the antisemitism behind so much of modern conspiracism is based on a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the Jews. What most people accept loosely as the Judeo-Christian heritage is recast as a narrowly conceived birthright of the Aryan race, while actual Jews are themselves recast as an alien force trying to destroy that heritage.

Premillennial Apocalypticism

Hard as it may be to follow the logic of British Israelism and its interactions with two-seed theology and Khazarian Jews, the various millennial sects and their interactions with apocalypticism do not offer any respite. American religion had long been distinctly apocalyptic, giving it a “chronic predilection to locate and identify external antichrists,” finding them embodied in “ecclesiastical institutions, nation states, alien ideologies, and even specific individual[s].”23 But, toward the end of the nineteenth century, religious changes were underway that would make American religion even more focused on the apocalypse and the Antichrist.

Many have attributed outbreaks of conspiracist thinking partly to religious enthusiasm. In the nineteenth century, a puritan-infused Protestantism highlighted both American exceptionalism and a Manichean dichotomy of good versus evil. In addition, outbursts of evangelism such as the Second Great Awakening have been linked to intolerance and suspicion, thus contributing to early conspiracy theories such as anti-Masonry and anti-Catholicism.24 But to explain the rise of twentieth-century conspiracism, religion—or even Protestantism—is much too broad a concept. The specific aspects of religious belief that incline people toward conspiracy theories are millennialism and apocalypticism.25 In particular, premillennialist beliefs (in which the second coming of Jesus Christ precedes the millennium rather than following it) led people to anticipate the rise of the Antichrist and the resulting apocalyptic battle between good and evil. And while millennialism has existed for centuries, the main premillennialist variants—Fundamentalism, dispensationalism, and Pentecostalism—were early twentieth-century creations. Thus the link between millennialism and conspiracism is relatively recent.26

The most important source of this religious change arrived in America from British evangelist John Nelson Darby’s literalist reading of the book of Revelation. Darby taught that God’s next “dispensation” (the last had been the crucifixion) would be the Rapture, “followed in quick order by Antichrist, tribulation, Armageddon, millennium, Satan’s comeback and final defeat, resurrection and the last judgment.” Against a late nineteenth-century context of “rampant scientism” and overly sophisticated biblical criticism, Darby believed that “an interpretation that was simple, clear, and assured would be compelling. The divine authority of Scripture required literal fulfillment of the prophecies. The end was very near; but it was not predictable. . . . Only one thing was known for certain: the Bible was never wrong. Biblical inerrancy became an article of faith . . . among American fundamentalists.”27

Premillennialism in general, Darbyist or not, carried with it a distinct set of social ideas. Postmillennialism, which had dominated American evangelism until after the Civil War, had been associated with reform movements such as the Second Great Awakening, abolition of slavery, and temperance, as well as with anti-Masonry. Its positive outlook also made it compatible with America’s mission in the world. This positivity followed from postmillennialism’s core eschatological point: “The belief that Christ will return after the thousand-year reign (Rev 20:4). God’s will is achieved by improving the world rather than destroying it. The churches can hasten the millennium through evangelism, prayer, and reform. Post-millennialists combine a prophetic eschatology with an essentially optimistic and progressive view of history.”28 By the end of the century postmillennialists had largely been drawn into the Social Gospel and Progressive Era reform movements, leaving traditional religion open to a more conservative direction.

Premillennialist apocalyptic eschatology led directly down this conservative path. Anticipating the rise of the Antichrist and Armageddon, premillennialists devoted their efforts solely to converting people to their brand of Christianity before this final cataclysm. Reform movements, from this perspective, were worse than useless; they gave people false hope and distracted Christians from their true task. During the Progressive Era, religious fundamentalists in general and premillennialists in particular began to feel that they were losing ground to a Christianity “busied with such secular things as labor unions, social settlements, and even the promotion of socialism.” In response, dispensationalist premillennialism was “shaped by a desire to strike back against everything modern—the higher criticism, evolutionism, the social gospel, rational criticism of any kind.”29

The backlash of theological and social conservatism was institutionalized over the next few years. In 1909, the Scofield Reference Bible was published, containing dispensationalist, premillennialist commentary alongside the King James text. Beginning in 1910, Lyman Stewart, president of Union Oil of California, began a project that actually created the term “fundamentalist.” Along with his brother Milton, Stewart oversaw the production of ninety essays into a twelve-volume work titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. Inspired by his desire to “stem the tide of liberalism,” Stewart funded the world-wide distribution of these essays through the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, which he had founded in 1908.30

At its extreme, this newly codified fundamentalist, premillennialist dispensationalism was antisemitic as well. One of the most prominent fundamentalist preachers of the era, William Bell Riley, explicitly linked the Jews to the Protocols and thus to Communism. James Gray, president of the dispensationalist Moody Bible College in Chicago, found the just-published Protocols to be “a clinching argument for premillennialism and another sign of the possible nearness of the end of the age.” Evangelist Arno Gaebelein used the Protocols to bolster his argument (one repeated regularly ever since) that, while many Jews were blameless, “apostate” Jews were busy spreading Bolshevism, bootlegging liquor, and undermining the morals of America.31

Premillennialism and conspiracism both rely on a Manichean outlook. Richard Hofstadter described the connection as “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary.” A millennialist drawn into a political battle, he concluded, “is always manning the barricades of civilization. . . . It is now or never in organizing resistance to the conspiracy.”32 Early in the twentieth century, events such as the Russian Revolution and British support of Zionists in Palestine were interpreted by premillennialists as fulfilling biblical prophecy. Such events, among other signs of the impending apocalypse (the Great War, the influenza pandemic, global economic collapse), readied American premillennialists for the end-of-days scenario.

A separate but overlapping religious impetus toward conspiracism has traditionally featured Satan, with or without Armageddon. As far back as the eighteenth century, people had linked Satan to political plots. Satan’s role in politics waned in the nineteenth century but rebounded strongly in the more apocalyptic religious milieu of the early twentieth century. In addition, the bizarre theory combining Satan’s pre-Adamite role, his fathering of Cain, and his Synagogue of Satan became an integral part of Christian Identity conspiracism.33 While the central features of this religious movement were antisemitism and racism, its political messages embodied unusual satanic connections. Christian Identity leader William Potter Gale’s call to arms demanded that “we must oppose Satan and his evil ways with every power that God has given His children. The philosophy of Communism which is Satan’s form of government is being imposed on God’s Is-ra-el in their land. Communism . . . is atheistic and believes that the created are above the creator. Those who believe that the federal government is above the states that created it have accepted Satan’s Communistic philosophy.” This same logic was later used to oppose both one-world government and the admission of Alaska and Hawaii to the union.34 Many conspiracists have placed Satan at the center of their conspiracies. Take Gerald Winrod’s account of the Illuminati, for instance: “No matter where we find Illuminism or how we trace its ramifications, Satan is always the mastermind behind it.” And also Gerald L. K. Smith’s “blueprints of conspiracy in the great centers of Satanic power the world over,” and Tal Brooke’s new world order, “directly empowered by Satan himself.”35

The Occult Revival

The romance of the occult, the major nineteenth-century reaction against the growth of scientific thinking and Enlightenment rationality, contributed more ideas to twentieth-century conspiracism than one might imagine. Literary and artistic romanticism provided the groundwork for occultism. The rediscovery of medieval glories, especially in English literature, brought back images of knighthood—and with it the legends of the Templars and Knights of Malta. The arts aside, the last half of the nineteenth century spawned an incredible array of philosophical and quasi-scientific ideas, some of which had a direct impact on conspiratorial thinking in the twentieth century: first, spiritualist-based quasi-religious organizations; second, ancient knowledge (some perhaps true but most of it imaginary); and third, certain ancient races (again, some passably real but most of them imaginary). These three products of conspiratorial thinking were not entirely separate; the ancient knowledge, imagined to be far superior to mere science, belonged to the civilizations populated by the ancient races, and this same knowledge became the core ideology of the quasi-religious organizations. Taken together, they amount to what political scientist Michael Barkun referred to as a “cultural dumping ground of the heretical, the scandalous, the unfashionable, and the dangerous.”36

SPIRITUALIST ORGANIZATIONS

Originally, “spiritualism” was a term limited to communication with the dead, as in séances, but grew to encompass much more. One group associated with its positive aspects was the Rosicrucians, who had faded in the eighteenth century but rebounded in the mid-nineteenth century. Their leader in America, William Beverly Randolph, stressed love and healing, while his European counterpart, Eliphas Levi, stressed the occult in his Qabalistic Order of the Rose Cross headquartered in France. There were some connections between the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, who were also enjoying a resurgence, despite being viewed with some suspicion.37

Far and away the person who was most important to spiritualism was Madame Helena Blavatsky, who began her career as a medium and then explored Western occultism before cofounding the Theosophical Society in 1875. Moving to India, Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott developed a philosophy based on Eastern traditions. An account of the history of humanity, seemingly a struggle between the Ascended Masters of the Great White Lodge and their Black Lodge enemies, was given by these masters to “select messengers” such as Blavatsky. According to theosophical doctrine, the history of humanity was divided into five periods, each with its own “root race.” Beginning before history with beings from “The Imperishable Sacred Land,” new races emerged every several thousand years. The Hyperboreans, whose civilization lay in extreme northern latitudes, gave way to Atlanteans and then to Lemurians, before they were succeeded by the present race (begun in America, but not American Indians).38

Theosophy spawned several similar spiritualist organizations; at least two or three Rosicrucian organizations had essentially theosophical beginnings. The Vril Society in Germany used theosophical ideas, although the group’s main inspiration was Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 novel, The Coming Race.39 The most disturbing of these subsequent organizations is likely Rudolph Steiner’s Anthroposophical Society, founded in 1913. Steiner’s society was theosophical but with much more racism. In general, Steiner held that “‘lower races’ of humans are closer to animals than to ‘higher races’ of humans. Aboriginal peoples, according to anthroposophy, are descended from the already ‘degenerate’ remnants of the third root race, the Lemurians, and are devolving into apes. Steiner referred to them as ‘stunted humans whose progeny, the so-called wild peoples, inhabit certain parts of the earth today.”40 Confusingly similar to the Anthroposophists were the Ariosophists, also a creation of the early twentieth century. Largely organized by one Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, the Ariosophists grafted German völkisch racism onto Theosophy. Ariosophy described “a prehistoric golden age, when wise gnostic priesthoods had espoused occult-racist doctrines and ruled over a superior and racially pure society.” Sadly for them, a conspiracy advocating a “spurious egalitarianism” brought about by non-Aryans destroyed this civilization. To fight back Lanz von Liebenfels organized his followers into a semisecret organization not unlike the Knights Templar.41

ANCIENT KNOWLEDGE AND RACES: ARYANISM

The wisdom of the ancients (no matter which ancients) invariably involves what James Webb has called “flight from reason.” Much of this lore is, in one way or another, magic—ceremonial magic, astrology, psychic powers, “and a multitude of similar topics of doubtful intellectual responsibility.”42 Theosophists learned of astral projection from the Ascended Masters; Vril ideas encompassed the notion that Jesuit thinking is a remnant of Atlantis’s civilization; Anthroposophists emphasized the Atlanteans’ mental telepathy; and Lanz von Liebenfels’s neo-Templars discovered that the Holy Grail was actually “an electrical symbol pertaining to the ‘pan-psychic’ powers of the pure-blooded Aryan race.43 The role of race in this ancient knowledge is second only to occultism as a theme. Ideas of racial dominance and degeneration suffuse Theosophy and, even more so, its offshoots. Not surprisingly the emphasis on race consistently demonstrated the greatness of the Aryans.

Aryans had been invented by eighteenth-century linguists as a hypothetical people whose Indo-European language underlay more recent languages. Often referred to as Caucasians because they presumably hailed from somewhere in the Caucasus Mountains, the Aryans were increasingly romanticized as a cultured pastoral civilization. By the mid-nineteenth century, Aryans were being cast as race of such “near heroic proportions” as to make their modern-day descendants “seem degenerate in comparison.” This idea was the antithesis of evolution and led naturally to concerns about further degeneration through the mongrelization that had destroyed the purity of south Europeans.44 The concept of an Aryan race, steeped in antiquity and naturally dominant, was appealing to a great many European Theosophists, but the peculiar origins of Aryanism were often downplayed. The Vril-ya, Bulwer-Lytton’s fictional ancient race who derived supernatural powers from the Black Sun in the center of the earth, were “descended from the same ancestors as the great Aryan family, from which has flowed the dominant civilization of the world.”45 Madame Blavatsky had expanded her original hierarchy of “root races” to stress the “spiritual advance” marked by the Aryans. Blavatsky’s “cosmic evolution” provided a “ready-made account of Aryan superiority against the debris of lower unnatural half-breeds originating in racial defilement.”46 These actual sources of Aryanism were increasingly obscured as people would either present them vaguely as “gnostic” or emphasize their fairly respectable Hindu and Buddhist elements. But the key idea remained—not merely Aryan superiority, but something approaching a godlike superiority. Steiner’s anthroposophy drew out this idea, as did the ariosophy of Lanz von Liebenfels, whose neo-Templars were to replicate the “strict eugenic practices of the Templar Knights designed to breed god-men.”47

The flip side of Aryanism was, of course, the peril presented by other races and especially “racial mixing.” Blavatsky blamed the fall of the Lemurians on racial mixing, which led to the “breeding of monsters and inferior races.” This antipathy to miscegenation extended even to the mixing of blood through transfusions. Steiner, in his Occult Significance of Blood, claimed that, although blood from other races would not kill Aryans, it would destroy their “clairvoyant power.”48 The outlier facing Aryan racists was the Jews, who, after the Jewish Enlightenment, could not simply be dismissed (as other races were) as distant, primitive peoples.

As the “origin” of the Aryans shifted over time from the Himalayas to northern Europe, they emerged as the embodiment of “the purity of Germanic ‘blood.’”49 This new Aryanism was developed by a variety of writers and scholars, who downplayed its occultism. Ernest Renan, a French scholar who was a key figure in propagating the notion of Khazarian Jews, contrasted Aryans and “Semitic spirit.” One of the strongest Aryanists was an expatriate Englishman in Austria, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who interpreted history as an “elemental conflict between the ‘Aryan’ and the Semite, between the forces of strength and weakness, of idealism and materialism, of nobility and servility.”50 The Jews were being painted as the evil counterforce to Aryan civilization, an idea that meshed extremely well with both the Protocols and the two-seed idea of Jews as Satanic.

The Contribution to Conspiracism

Taken together, Protocols-based anti-Semitism, occultism, and Aryan racism contributed heavily to some of the most horrifying aspects of the twentieth century—above all, Nazi Germany.51 Those aspects of Nazi ideology most influenced by these forces were heavily conspiratorial and remain so. Indeed, over the last fifty years the residue of Nazism has spawned an array of bizarre theories incorporating conspiratorial ideas—for example, “Vril-Powered Nazi UFOs.” Illustrating a generous array of conspiratorial beliefs, one Wilhelm Landig “revived the ariosophical mythology of Thule, the supposed polar homeland of the ancient Aryans. He coined the idea of the Black Sun, a substitute swastika and mystical source of energy capable of regenerating the Aryan race. He popularized esoteric ideas current among the pre-Nazi völkisch movement and the SS relating to Atlantis, the World Ice Theory, prehistoric floods and secret racial doctrines from Tibet. He also drew attention to Nazi interest in the medieval Cathars and Grail traditions as an alternative Germanic religion of dualist heresy.”52

Beyond the Nazis, the racism and antisemitism distilled into the Protocols clearly influenced twentieth-century conspiracism in America. The conspiratorial content of this antisemitism is sometimes obscure but always present. From the 1920s onward, Jewish conspiracies abounded, as the following four examples show. Representative Louis McFadden of Pennsylvania relied on the Protocols as he regularly excoriated the Jewish financial conspiracy to destroy America from his position on the House Banking Committee. Science fiction writer Charles Hudson, an “obsessive conspiracy theorist,” published a regular bulletin that “ascribed to the Jews every calamity in American history from the assassination of Lincoln to the Johnstown flood.” The Russian refugee Count Cherep-Spiridovich spent a decade developing the Protocols into the conspiracy of “the hidden hand” (i.e., the “Judeo-Mongol world government”). Eugene Sanctuary, of the World Alliance against Jewish Aggressiveness, described the Jews as “Conspiring Termites” who cannot be exterminated or even seen. Only “the occasional collapse of some phase of governmental activity is proof that the form of termite we describe is assiduously working at his task the objectives of which are ably portrayed for us in the Protocols.”53

Dispensational millennialism similarly found its way into a great many twentieth-century conspiracy theories. Richard Hofstadter sketched out the influence of 1920s fundamentalism on antisemitic conspiracists such as Gerald Winrod, William Dudley Pelley, and Gerald L. K. Smith, as well as anti-Communist conspiracists who headed the various “Christian crusades” and the John Birch Society. Hofstadter’s view that an “essentially theological concern . . . underlies right-wing views of the world” has been extended to show how the 1920s Klan revival was based on premillennial conspiracism.54

William Pelley, generally thought of as a fascist leader rather than a millennialist, revealed this influence on his thinking in his “Private Manual, Number One,” a set of instructions to his fascist “Silver Shirt” followers. This call to action advised them on its opening page to “look out for the Hidden Hand and Cloven Hoof” behind any crisis, and continued with: “A Challenge to this Crisis. The Silver Shirts of the Liberators are a great Christian militia, swinging into disciplined ranks to challenge and annihilate the alien debaucheries of a Distressed Hour and in obedience to Divine Prophesy bring into practical action an Age of New Chivalry.”55 Similarly, Elizabeth Dilling, known primarily as a virulent anti-Communist, followed her exposés The Red Network and The Roosevelt Red Record with a vigorous attack on “Modernist ‘Christians,’” postmillennialist liberals who “persist in preaching that Lenin-inspired ‘peace’ movements and collectivized state power can bring humanity in its present sinful state into a millennial kingdom without Christ. . . . In their desire to find their life without disagreeable sacrifice, they fulfill part of the scripture verse: ‘He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.’ (Matt. 10:39)”56 Methodist minister Arno Gaebelein, a prominent premillennialist, wrote a much more sustained attack on “the road of modernism.” In his The Conflict of the Ages, the Manichean struggle between the forces of light and darkness was replicated as the Communist conspiracy against traditional Christianity. Modernist, progressive Christians would find that this road would “lead on, on, on to atheism, to world revolution, national disaster and finally to the judgment of an Almighty God.” Gerald Winrod, a dispensationalist evangelist from Kansas, interspersed his religious works (e.g., Science, Christ, and the Bible) with intensely antisemitic conspiracy theories such as The Truth about the Protocols and Adam Weishaupt, a Human Devil.57

As early as the 1930s, many supporters of fascism in general and the Nazis in particular were steeped in the occult. In England, Edith Starr Miller’s conspiracy opus, Occult Theocrasy, relied heavily on Masonic works, on theosophical sources, and even on the occult hoaxes of Léo Taxil. Also in England, Christina Stoddard built on the foundation of Illuminized Freemasonry a superstructure of Gnostics and Cabalists to develop her lurid conspiracy of the “ancient serpent.” Stoddard’s conspirators aimed “to awaken this serpent, the sex-force or ‘God within’ man, raising it by processes and Yogic methods” to unleash the “Universal Creative Principle.” In a convoluted fashion, this allowed the conspirators to dominate “the masses” and lead them to internationalism and “universalism.”58 In America, the most notable of occultist conspiracy theorist was the aforementioned William Pelley, founder of the crypto-Nazi Silver Shirts, whose work was infused with an extraterrestrial dimension. Pelley was not alone in fusing the occult and the political. Eugene Sanctuary’s Are These Things So?, which rehashes Robison’s and Barruel’s conspiracies, includes an appendix explaining “some claims of the occult forces” used by conspirators—specifically thought transference and astral projection. Although Sanctuary maintains that these abilities are “merely intangible forces of nature which science has not, as yet, definitely recognized,” he tries to buttress this claim with lengthy quotations from The Secret of the Zodiac and an article about Freemasonry from the Rosicrucian Magazine. And West Coast magazine publisher William Kullgren embedded most of his conspiratorial ideas in his astrological pronostications.59

Without these disparate nineteenth-century developments, the modern conspiracism of the twentieth century would not be the same and might not have come into being at all. In this regard, the antisemitism of the Protocols stands out as obvious, while Aryanism and the occult are more muted in their effects. But Aryanism underlies a great deal of right-wing militia conspiracism, and occult thinking has expanded greatly, inspiring some of the more peculiar conspiracy thinking of the last fifty years. Of the three influences, antisemitism flourished earliest, as the mainstay of the conspiracism opposing the New Deal. After World War II, the flagrant antisemitism of the 1930s subsided, kept alive only by a fairly small band of unrepentant Nazis. Taking its place, especially as the civil rights movement emerged, an Aryan-based racism revived, including new developments in British Israelism conspiracy theories. Then, accompanying the rise of “new age” thinking in the 1960s, occultism became increasingly an integral part of conspiracy theories. This is clearest in UFO conspiracies but is also present in most contemporary religion-based conspiracy theories as well.